The hardest language in the world?

Originally Posted by Acro-nym

Anybody have any idea if Maltese is hard to learn? Being a blend of Arabic and Latin, it seems like it should be at least slightly confusing.

I'm Maltese, so I'll probably ramble on this one. ^^;

Maltese was the first language I learnt, so I can't say whether it was difficult or not... the first language is always "easy", being acquired when our Language Acquisition Device is still functioning at its best. There are some people here, however, who are not native speakers of Maltese even though they're Maltese (and born to Maltese parents) - a certain part of the population believes in speaking to newborns in English, and sometimes even continues to speak mostly English for the rest of its life. Such people usually find it difficult to learn Maltese, though part of it might be their attitude towards the language - they usually believe that Maltese is somehow a lesser language to English. So they might study it at school and have ample opportunity to practise it, but they still have somewhat stilted Maltese. This happens even with people who start learning Maltese as a second language from a relatively young age, say around 12 years of age.

Many Maltese, including myself actually, are put off (to different extents) by the perceived difficulty of Maltese ortography. The grammar is relatively easy - no declensions, very few tenses, no tones, etc. Most people have appalling ortography however... I think the culprit is a low amount of reading in our language, since there isn't much actually. Apart from some newspapers and magazines (themselves usually filled with appalling syntax and vocabulary choices) there are few books worth reading.

On to vocabulary. The influx of new words from English and Italian (I suppose this is the Latin influence you mentioned?) means that apart from really basic or everyday words, Arabic is becoming less and less represented in the language. This is because people when speaking tend to mangle English or Italian words instead of thinking of the Maltese equivalent... we're becoming too lazy to speak Maltese.

Foreigners who live in Malta for some time and do make the effort of learning the language usually learn it quickly enough, however.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Neus, Serbian and Croatian, from what you've explained, have a phonetic ortography. English was never standardised before the mid 16th century, I think, so everybody basically wrote as he felt it was best. English already had absorbed many words from a variety of languages, and their ortography was not based on English but rather on the language of origin (French, for example). So when it was standardised they probably chose the form which was most common, not which made the most ortographically sense.

Originally Posted by neus

Also, out of the blue - I find English to be damned choppy. It isn't as musical as other languages like Italian and French. It seems to be switching directions with each word and ... it just doesn't flow. Anyone else get this feeling?

I don't notice it, but everybody says that's true. Also, it's difficult to hear a song in Italian (and probably French, but I don't know it) and not understand most of the song. I tend to not understand certain verses of songs in English, even after a lot of listens (and I mean a lot).

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Max Biggs

For people like you and me, it might actually be impossible. I recall reading somewhere that if you don't grow up learning a language that involves manipulating clicks and other sounds (such as many African languages and their dialects), by the time you're past eight or so, it registers in a different hemisphere of your brain as sound and noise, not as a language. Someone correct me if you know I'm wrong.

As far as I know this extends beyond clicks... basically when we're young we cannot discriminate, and therefore our ears pick up all the phonemes we hear in a language. Those phonemes which are not part of the mother tongue however are ignored until the listener can't actually hear them as phonemes or else does not differentiate between that phoneme and a similar one in his native language. That is why speakers of Chinese and Japanese can't hear any difference between the 'r' and 'l' sounds, I was told... basically their phoneme is somewhere in the middle of those two sounds, and since there isn't a pure 'l' or 'r' in the original languages they tend not to pronounce them when speaking a foreign language.

I'm not speaking from experience there, since I've never asked a Japanese whether this is true, but I do know that I can't hear the difference between the open and closed vowels in Italian (there are 7, not 5, vowels) because in my native language there isn't this distinction.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I agree with what Oric said, but I remembered what I had heard about Georgian and checked with Wikipedia (ok, not the most authoritative reference, but whatever... the article seems professional enough). Georgian has

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

...some formidable consonant clusters, as may be seen in words like gvprtskvni ("You peel us") and mtsvrtneli ("trainer").

It also has a complicated (I suppose) morphological system:

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

Georgian has seven cases of the noun: nominative, ergative, dative, genitive, instrumental, adverbial and vocative.

I could never learn German because I never understood the dative and accusative cases, so I shudder to think what I would have done with Georgian ^_____^.

Even the number system is bloody strange:

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

Georgian has a vigesimal number system, based on the counting system of 20, like Basque or Old French. In order to express a number greater than 20 and less than 100, first the number of 20's in the number is stated and the remaining number is added. For example, 93 is expressed as four-score-and-thirteen.

Ok, this is not necessarily difficult, but it is a little weird.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?